If you're a frequent reader of 80 Level, you can probably recognize the artist behind this rig right away: Nikodem "DemNikoArt" Bredlich, a master of mechanical rigs. You may have seen his impressive robot arm, mecha walk cycle animation, a car suspension rig, or other projects.

The fully rigged jet nozzle, complete with all its detailed moving parts, took around 2-3 weeks to create, working on it intermittently. All movements are controlled by just one bone. It's based on the EJ200 engine, which mainly powers the Eurofighter Typhoon, although the rear section is improvised.

DemNikoArt has also shared the first render test of his jet engine in action. He clarified that this is just a single frame from the initial blast meant to emphasize the impact.

Apparently, the scene is very lightweight. The blast and thrust effects are mostly achieved using textures applied to cones and cylinders, with animation spanning just a few frames. Camera shake, motion blur, and carefully placed lighting do the rest. DemNikoArt's setup consists of an AMD Ryzen 9 5900XT, an NVIDIA RTX 5080, and 64 GB of RAM.

The artist also offers an eight-part course covering various aspects of mechanical rigging in Blender. It won't teach you to build a complex engine like this overnight, but it's a great starting point for creating mechanical robots with complex rigs. We also recommend checking out DemNikoArt's YouTube channel, where he shares Blender rigging tutorials, including how to rig a folding chair:

You can get the jet engine rig through DemNikoArt's Patreon.

And if you're more interested in character rigging, Noggi has an almost hour-long video covering all the basics:

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